“To study history is to look for patterns”, says Roderick Beaton in his book Europe: a New History.
Why do we need a “new” history of Europe? Because, as Beaton emphasises, patterns change. Indeed, without a “new” history it is difficult to understand modern Greece and its relations with its neighbours.
The Balkans, with Greece as the focal point of the land mass, are central to understanding Europe past and present. The constant changing of patterns underlines the fluidity of geopolitics: attitudes change, politics change, maps change, history changes.
Beaton makes the point that the establishment of Greece as the first “national” state of Europe was “an accident of birth”. It was an accident of history, too, which placed Greece at the centre of the Balkan wars of 1912-13 that morphed so incomprehensibly (at the time) into the first World War. “The whole conflict”, Beaton insists, “would last for thirty-one years. And Europe would never afterwards resume its place in the world.”
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Even in 1943 a Greek politician could envisage Athens as the economic hub of a united Balkans. But the following year Greece was separated from Josef Stalin’s sphere of influence, which split Europe between east and west. Winston Churchill acceded to Stalin’s takeover of Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Yugoslavia, in order to keep Greece within “western” Europe.
And in the aftermath of the second World War came the Cold War, the end of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Yugoslav Federation into its six (possibly seven) constituent states, and today’s war in Ukraine: so the map, not only on paper but in people’s minds, continues to undergo revision.
That two power-mongers could divide Europe in 1944 should come as no surprise to us in 2026, when characters like Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Binyamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin can dominate the agenda for Europe and the Middle East. It recalls the arrogance and prescience of the British prime minister William Pitt after the battle of Austerlitz in 1805: “Roll up that map of Europe; it will not be wanted these 10 years.”
The fact that Greece, for historical reasons, took so long under international pressure to recognise the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia as the Republic of North Macedonia in 2018, is an indication of how history, and emotions, can insert themselves into present-day thinking. Greece, too, has its own northern province of Macedonia, which it annexed in 1913 and which borders the two lakes at Prespa. Prespa became the focus of international attention as the site where Greece finally accepted the name for North Macedonia.
The great lake of Prespa, as Julian Hoffman explains in his award-winning book, Lifelines: Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece, is the meeting point of three states: Albania, Greece and North Macedonia. It, and the smaller lake, are drying up. This not only affects the livelihood of the fishermen, but means that the borders of all three countries are actually shifting.
Not only that, but, Hoffman tells me, to walk from his village in Greece to the neighbouring village in North Macedonia is a 20-minute stroll; to drive there on official roads, through checkpoints, takes two-and-a-half hours. So much for the fluidity of borders.
As Beaton tells us, another accident waiting to happen was “Grexit”, when Greece came as near as possible to leaving the euro zone in 2012. Instead, Brexit happened (again, almost an accident), following which, Beaton observes, “no other country has so far chosen to follow the same path”. The “so far” is Beaton’s wry indication that the map might change again.
Beaton’s book opens and closes with two Greece-related cities: Athens (and the Battle of Marathon, when Athens defeated the huge army of the Persian Empire in 490 BC), and today’s Ukrainian city of Mariupol, with a substantial ethnic Greek population, which, like other Ukraine cities with a significant Greek presence, has been devastated by the Russian invasion. Both incidents demonstrate the mutability of concepts such as borders and, therefore, maps.
As Elena Lazarou, the director general of the Greek Foundation for European and Foreign Policy recently observed, Greece may not be a big player in the world game, but it “occupies a strategic crossroads”. She meant not only in geopolitical terms, but because Greece can “offer ideas, shape policy debates, build networks of trust, cultivating complementarity” – that is, to contribute to the mental or conceptual map of Europe that Beaton depicts in his book. In one sense, Greece is peripheral; in another, it can be central.
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The Melting Pot was the title of Hakan Morne’s 1937 study of the Balkans (moving from Corfu to the Greek mainland, through Albania to “Slav Macedonia”), and that title remains very relevant today. This region is a fragile and ever-developing kaleidoscope of peoples, faiths, cultures, languages, migrating birds and wildlife (wild bears, as Hoffman tells us, have little regard for political borders). The maps remain fluid and ephemeral.
